During all of this debate about Google Print, Amazon has been awfully quiet. But in reading the print version of Information Week (Nov 7, 2005) I came across a short article “Pay By The Page” outlining Amazon’s plans to expand its “Search Inside the Book” technology to let customers buy part of a book or read it online – for a fee.

This got my curiosity. In roaming around the web I came across references to two potential new services from Amazon, “Amazon Pages” and “Amazon Update” on a recent (Nov 3, 2005) CNET story:

Amazon’s new “Amazon Pages” program will let people purchase online access to anywhere from a few pages of a book to an entire work. The e-commerce company also announced a program called “Amazon Upgrade” that will let customers pay extra to be able to access books electronically that they’ve had shipped to them in printed form.

“Buy a cookbook and you will not only have it on your shelf, but also be able to access it anywhere via the Web,” Amazon said in a statement.

Finally, and with some creativity, the ‘book meets the web’ race is on in full force. We, the readers, will all benefit.

Comments

Micro-payment meet micro-content! :-) A good point, as the technology evolves so do the monetization strategies.

I wonder if Amazon had come up with the ‘Google Book Search’ product, if Publishers would have reacted differently? The search credibility wouldn’t have been the same, but the closer Amazon/Publisher relationship might have helped.